to all of the people who are on robotics, I thank you for giving me the chance and happiness that i had never had before. robotics has been the happiest thing i have ever done in my life
- gondorf [more]

People who work in the fields of science and technology are not like other people. This can be frustrating to the nontechnical people who have to deal with them. The secret to coping with technology-oriented people is to understand their motivations. This chapter will teach you everything you need to know. I learned their customs and mannerisms by observing them, much the way Jane Goodall learned about the great apes, but without the hassle of grooming.

Engineering is so trendy these days that everybody wants to be one. The word "engineer" is greatly overused. If there's somebody in your life who you think is trying to pass as an engineer, give him this test to discern the truth.

ENGINEER IDENTIFICATION TEST
You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked. You...

A. Straighten it.
B. Ignore it.
C. Buy a CAD system and spend the next six months designing a solar-powered, self-adjusting picture frame while often stating aloud your belief that the inventor of the nail was a total moron.

The correct answer is "C" but partial credit can be given to anybody who writes "It depends" in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole stupid thing on "Marketing."

SOCIAL SKILLS
Engineers have different objectives when it comes to social interaction.

"Normal" people expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social interaction:

* Stimulating and thought-provoking conversation
* Important social contacts
* A feeling of connectedness with other humans

In contrast to "normal" people, engineers have rational objectives for social interactions:

* Get it over with as soon as possible.
* Avoid getting invited to something unpleasant.
* Demonstrate mental superiority and mastery of all subjects.

FASCINATION WITH GADGETS
To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1)things that need to be fixed, and (2)things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

No engineer looks at a television remote control without wondering what it would take to turn it into a stun gun. No engineer can take a shower without wondering if some sort of Teflon coating would make showering unnecessary. To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of sub-optimized and feature-poor toys.

FASHION AND APPEARANCE
Clothes are the lowest priority for an engineer, assuming the basic thresholds for temperature and decency have been satisfied. If no appendages are freezing or sticking together, and if no genitalia or mammary glands are swinging around in plain view, then the objective of clothing has been met. Anything else is a waste.

LOVE OF "STAR TREK"
Engineers love all of the "Star Trek" television shows and movies. It's a small wonder, since the engineers on the starship Enterprise are portrayed as heroes, occasionally even having sex with aliens. This is much more glamorous than the real life of an engineer, which consists of hiding from the universe and having sex without the participation of other life forms.

DATING AND SOCIAL LIFE
Dating is never easy for engineers. A normal person will employ various indirect and duplicitous methods to create a false impression of attractiveness. Engineers are incapable of placing appearance above function.

Fortunately, engineers have an ace in the hole. They are widely recognized as superior marriage material: intelligent, dependable, employed, honest, and handy around the house. While it's true that many normal people would prefer not to date an engineer, most normal people harbor an intense desire to mate with them, thus producing engineer-like children who will have high-paying jobs long before losing their virginity.

Male engineers reach their peak of sexual attractiveness later than normal men, becoming irresistible erotic dynamos in their mid thirties to late forties. Just look at these examples of sexually irresistible men in technical professions:

* Bill Gates.
* MacGyver.
* Etcetera.

Female engineers become irresistible at the age of consent and remain that way until about thirty minutes after their clinical death. Longer if it's a warm day.

HONESTY
Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.

Engineers sometimes bend the truth to avoid work. They say things that sound like lies but technically are not because nobody could be expected to believe them. The complete list of engineer lies is listed below.

"I won't change anything without asking you first."
"I'll return your hard-to-find cable tomorrow."
"I have to have new equipment to do my job."
"I'm not jealous of your new computer."

FRUGALITY
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, "How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?"

POWERS OF CONCENTRATION
If there is one trait that best defines an engineer it is the ability to concentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in the environment. This sometimes causes engineers to be pronounced dead prematurely. Some funeral homes in high-tech areas have started checking resumes before processing the bodies. Anybody with a degree in electrical engineering or experience in computer programming is propped up in the lounge for a few days just to see if he or she snaps out of it.

RISK
Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake, the media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.

RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people
REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.

Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are far too complicated to explain.

If that approach is not sufficient to halt a project, then the engineer will fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it will cost too much."

EGO
Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:

1. How smart they are.
2. How many cool devices they own.

The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal - a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.

Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex- and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.

Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."

At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop.

Well, we did use Photoshop to design the graphics and paint scheme. Of course, to do it correctly, we had to have an accurate image of the shape of the car to use as the background image in Photoshop. So it just seemed easier to knock together a quick CAD model instead of taking a photo...

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If you have "Dilbert" comics displayed anywhere in your work area

See the "Dilbert Zone" poster hanging in my office.

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If you don't even know where the cover to your personal computer is

It had a cover?

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If you have never backed-up your hard drive

Backups are for wussies.

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If you have more toys than your kids

Guilty. And they are bigger and more expensive.

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If your I.Q. number is bigger than your weight

I am not even going to touch that one...

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If you have memorized the program schedule for the Discovery channel and have seen most of the shows already

Monster House is on Mondays at 8:00, followed by Monster Garage, and then American Chopper. If you stay up until 1:00am you can see them all again.

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If you own a set of itty-bitty screw drivers, but you don't remember where they are

I actually OWN at least six sets. I can FIND one.

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If you have ever owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for

Reverse Polish Notation. I once wrote an algorithm to convert from conventional notation to RPN and back again, just because I felt like it.

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If your 4 basic food groups are: 1.Caffeine 2.Fat 3.Sugar 4.Chocolate

And I can consume all four of them with two tiems: Diet coke and a chocolate covered Krispy Kreme donut.

So just stamp "GEEK" on my forehead, and let me get back to watching "Myth Busters"

-dave

__________________ "I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
- Stuart Vasepuru, 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

If, at Christmas, it goes without saying that you will be the one to find the burnt-out bulb in the string

Of course. Although one year, I started trying to figure out a device that would make that job obsolete. I'm still working on it...

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If your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical inaccuracies

My ideal evening is watching them. I pick up on the inaccuracies as I go. In an episode of Enterprise (do I lose points for not knowing the name?), Dr. Soong used an escape pod to get off of a Klingon ship. But, everyone knows that Klingons don't have escape pods; they're dishonorable.

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If you thought the concoction ET used to phone home was stupid

When I was a kid, I was too scared of ET to notice that. Later, however, I did realize that an alien that posesses interstellar transportation technology should have come up with something better.

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If you have never backed-up your hard drive

What if I made the computer make backups on it's own? I couldn't find enough drives to make a nice RAID, so I wrote a script to automatically make copies on another computer.

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If the salespeople at Circuit City can't answer any of your questions

I haven't tried Circuit City, but the Radioshack guys are pretty worthless.

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If you have ever owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for

I'm not old enough to own a calculator that used Reverse Polish Notation. Do I still get points if I've successfully operated one?

I want a clarification on this one. Depending how the sentence is parsed, this could mean "If you can quote a scene from at least one Monty Python movie" or "If you can quote at least one scene from every Monty Python movie." Is the correct interpretation the first one or the second.

Actually, never mind, it really doesn't matter.

-dave

"Oooohhhh, I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day..."

"It's only a flesh wound! Come back you pansy!"

"I heard he nailed your head to the floor?" "Yeah, well I deserved it, didn't I? After all, I had broken the unwritten law."

"We are three wise men." " Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o'clock in the morning? That doesn't sound very wise to me."

"There is not one of us who would not gladly suffer death to rid this country of the Romans once and for all." "Uh, well, one." "Oh, yeah, yeah, there's one. But otherwise, we're solid."

"Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ping. This is my favorite."

"It is the middle of the dark ages, ages darker than anyone had expected."

"Dead? That's no excuse for laying off work."

"Dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence."

__________________ "I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
- Stuart Vasepuru, 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

OK, so which is more geeky - knowing several scenes from multiple Monty Python movies and being able to recite them from memory, or actually owning your very own personal copy of a Monty Python screenplay???

-dave

__________________ "I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
- Stuart Vasepuru, 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

OK, so which is more geeky - knowing several scenes from multiple Monty Python movies and being able to recite them from memory, or actually owning your very own personal copy of a Monty Python screenplay???

-dave

Or... maybe, just maybe, it is more geeky spending time typing the scene out on a computer of said screenplay.
Brian has my vote for Uber-Geek of the year here on CD.

*cough* holy grail was one of the worst movies I ever saw *cough*That attack bunny barely made it worth watching.

__________________

The influence of many leads to the individuality of one. - E.C.C. (That's me!!)